1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for dynamically expanding a virtual cluster and a recording medium on which a program for executing the method is recorded, and more particularly, to a method and system for dynamically expanding a virtual cluster based on the amount of resources used by the virtual cluster even without setting modification of the virtual cluster by a user of the virtual cluster, and a recording medium on which a program for executing the method is recorded.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hypervisor technology has made it possible to generate a plurality of virtual machines (VMs) in one physical server and thus provide a plurality of virtual servers. The hypervisor technology can be applied to, e.g., the field of cloud computing. For example, a cloud computing service user may establish a VM, which is allocated with resources that meet his or her needs, in a physical server device provided by a service operator, thereby saving the cost of operating a server. A hypervisor manages virtualized hardware resources and provisions a VM using some of the resources. Here, the phrase “provisioning the VM” may denote connecting resources allocated to the VM to a VM instance.
A cloud computing service provider may provide a user with a cloud computing service in units of VM instances. However, the cloud computing service provider may also provide the user with the cloud computing service in units of virtual clusters, each composed of a plurality of VM instances. In this case, the user can obtain the effect of operating a virtual server pool and can save management costs compared with when operating a physical server pool. In addition, the user of the virtual cluster can retain large-scale computing power compared with when using the cloud computing service in units of VMs. Therefore, the virtual cluster service is a cloud service suitable for processing the so-called “big data.”
Solutions that provide a virtual cluster to a user in the form of a service are being provided. These solutions establish a virtual cluster (called “Hadoop cluster”) that can collect and process large data using virtualized infrastructure resources and provide the virtual cluster to a user. The solutions can establish a virtual cluster according to a user's needs by utilizing VMs and cloud storage provided by cloud infrastructure. However, once the virtual cluster is established, it is impossible to control the size of the virtual cluster.
Even after a virtual cluster is established, some solutions can add and delete virtual server instances through manual modification of the setting of the virtual cluster by a user. However, when the amount of data or work that needs to be processed increases, the size of the virtual cluster is not automatically expanded. This reduces job processing speed or interrupts a job, thereby resulting in data loss or failing to meet the user's service expectations.
A virtualization-based resource management apparatus and method and a computing system for virtualization-based resource management are disclosed in Korea Patent Publication No. 2010-0073959. The above published patent discloses the resource management of not a virtual cluster but a single VM. In addition, information about VM monitoring is used merely to determine the scale of VM resources managed by a management VM by calculating a time cost based on network traffic of the management VM. Thus, this patent still fails to solve problems related to the dynamic expansion of a virtual cluster.